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This mentioning of scaffolding in the book has caused problems for others too.

We won’t be generating any permanent scaffolding in this project, but I do encourage you to experiment with this approach in your own projects, as there may be cases in which you’ll find it useful.

The key word's are won't ... in this project and experiment ... your own projects.
But the use of the word "permanent" and the inclusion of the example command line syntax (which uses a same ModelName and field:type-s) is misleading.

Have you tried the "Destroy What You Create!" tip (pg. 147)?

If you ever mess up a call to script/generate, you may find its alter ego script/destroy very helpful. This takes exactly the same arguments as script/generate but attempts to reverse what it did, removing newly generated files and modifications to existing files. You can think of the two scripts as the upand downmethods of a migration.

I have never tried it, but the I think the syntax would be the same as the script/generate you used ("takes exactly the same arguments") except it would be script/destroy instead.

If that doesn't work, you will need to go back to at least page 121. Although it would probably be best to delete the shovell directory, do "rails shovell" again to recreate the directory, CREATE 'stories' table again (pg. 102), and then go to page 121

1)DELETE the entire "shovell" folder from "rails_apps"
2)start over from scratch? i.e. follow the other instructions you gave.

Thanks for the input! Learning new technologies is fun but incredibly frustrating. Makes you feel like an idiot :-(.

I was confused by the book in that I am assuming everything in bold black is to be entered into the console. In certain parts of the book it is very descriptive in that it says "type this" and other places it is more vague as it is here.

Yes, it can be very frustrating. Did you try the script/destroy ?
I would only start from scratch as a last resort. Although I myself did so 3 times before I got through the entire book. Once I figured out that I should save a copy of the app directory after each chapter (as shovell_5. shovell_6, etc.) everything went OK and I didn't need to go back to the back-up copy of the last successful chapter (Murphy's Law ). But I suggest you save back-up copies periodically so you won't need to start from scratch if you run into problems again.

Yes I tried it...didn't seem to do anything. I had to close the console and reopen because I couldn't figure out how to get back to a line that had >>....the console wouldn't allow me to type anything. Tried to use CTRL+d ...didn't work......" .quit" didn't work.

I just deleted the whole folder.

Not to sound stupid, but how do you suggest I make a backup? What I mean is, when I am running from the console, I guess I would just call it up "cd shovell_6" etc.?

That makes sense. Thanks for the help. Thank God for sitepoint forums!

You could do that. But I would simply delete the app directory (or rename to shovell_buggy, if you want to look at it or try to debug it at some point) and copy the last good chapter (or whatever stage you save at, depends on how far back you want to go) renamed back to shovell and try again.